


Rolling in the Deep

by singasongofdestiel



Category: Adele (Musician), Supernatural
Genre: Adele – Freeform, Anger, Angst, Blood and Injury, Heartbreak, Heavy Angst, M/M, Songfic, Violence, fighter cas, rolling in the deep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-15
Updated: 2015-06-15
Packaged: 2018-04-04 13:40:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4139805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singasongofdestiel/pseuds/singasongofdestiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel is good at what he does now. Fighting is his way of coping with what he has lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rolling in the Deep

Standing in front of the mirror, Castiel Novak inspected himself.

 

At first he didn’t look like much, as always, with his wiry limbs and heavy glasses. But the burning that climbed through his torso forced him to see instead the developing muscles and bruises filigreeing his ribs. An interlocking armour of injury surrounded him, but failed to protect. He turned away from himself, put his contacts in.

 

The fire started in his heart, poured his darkness like smoke into his nostrils, dragging his past into crystal clarity. It was emblazoned across everything he did.

 

The curdling cheers over the tannoy told him that it was time. He left the prep room, followed the familiar sweat-stained corridors to the ring.

 

 _I’ll lay your shit bare_. Castiel let the fury blossom in him. _Go ahead and sell me out._ The bullets of memory cauterized his mind, chiselling his fighter’s mask. He was unrecognisable and enhanced— the model soldier, _Aristos Achaion_.

 

Goddamn it, he would take every last piece. He would consume and char; he would scald and tar until their pain made a rhyming couplet.

 

Into the swirling lights and screams of the stadium, his light frame slipped easily between the ropes, standing in the ring as the referee announced his name.

 

“Here to bring down heaven’s wrath on our current champ— it’s the Avenger!”

The rolled ‘r’ cited the crowd into further cries; mostly listing injuries Castiel would feel.

 

Pain cried into his mind via his cheekbone as he realised, a little belatedly, that the match had begun. He was carried through the air into the chastising embrace of the ropes.

“Going for a little fly, angel?”

Turning around, his feet reasserting their control, Castiel stared into his opponent’s face. A hefty bear of a man with scars stumbling across his jaw line.

The shadows of his chest released a poisonous growl.

“Don’t you underestimate me.” He pushed himself towards the brute, and his internal blaze reached fever pitch.

 

The pain in his cheek glazed over, the bone probably broken. Another physical scar took Castiel’s exterior one inch closer to resembling his interior. It didn’t matter. The marks he earned here weren’t the ones that left him breathless, panting in the middle of the night as he silently screamed for what he had lost.

 

 _We could have had it all._ He drove forward, grunting as his knuckles met with the flesh of his opponent’s stomach. Pleasure laced his anger, fanning its heat. He brought his other fist up into the satisfying target of a jaw once broken.

 

As the pair moved towards the centre of the ring, Castiel vowed to make the other man burn. He had no story to tell anymore, only the narration of his past mattered. Even in the depths of his despair, he couldn’t forget.

 

The charring thoughts powered a swift uppercut that met with nose.

 

A reply struck his stomach, winding him. He had found a home in searing solitude. _We could have had it all_. Everything. But now there was nothing he could, or would, share.

 

Regaining lung control he danced around his partner, his cardiovascular system’s health unreflective of his scorched heart.

 

His eyes met those of the man opposite him, their muddy-green kindling the desperate fire that consumed his every action.

 

He could no longer see, the swelling of his cheek finalising the effects of blinding rage. Those eyes mutated into another’s, a flickering taunt.

 

_You had my heart inside of your hand._

Knee met fleshy stomach.

 _All of me. But you played it_.

The other man staggered backwards, Castiel relentless in pursuit.

_With a beating, you left me._

He closed his eyes, warmth smearing his knuckles, in collision with teeth.

_You left me._

 

He punched again and again, forcing the other man to the ground. His face was inhuman, a snarling mass of grief incinerated.

 _You’re gonna wish you never met me_.

Those eyes were scared now, redness creeping through burst capillaries, but Castiel could still see a sharper, brighter green dancing behind his eyelids. He would crumple the light out of that; dampen the colour until it resembled his own decayed blue.

 

Mechanically, his fist pistoned on repeat. Even with his eyes open, he was only remembering.

 

Those words, so tenderly naïve at the time— words delivered with a kiss always become a curse.

“Throw your soul through every opportunity, Cas. Count your blessings to find what you’re looking for.”

He had counted his blessings all right, now reduced to nil. He had held what he was looking for, held it so tightly that it shattered. He threw his sorrow behind his punches, watching as purple branded the mess of face below him. He could no longer hear his surroundings, hearing instead the breathed caresses of memorised intimacy.

 

He had given everything, bared his soul. He had been flayed and ignited and left burning in the wreckage of heartbreak.

 

His feet assisted his hands now. He would pay all of it back in kind; reap what had been sown in him. Fighting offered him a way to turn his sorrow into cash, and rage made it easy money.

 

Suddenly, he was gripped by cold hands, pushed roughly backwards while someone screamed in his face. Or at least, he assumed they were screaming— he was still shuttered in rage, but he could feel spittle fleck his burning skin.

 

His chest was rising and falling disparagingly, forcing him to concede to the tugging arms. His own arm was raised above his head as he watched the body pulled off stage. He felt nothing but the torrefied remembrance.

 _We could have had it all._  
  
He had offered it all to Dean. And Dean had taken it. For a while it had been returned in kind, but those kinds of things never last.

 

Dean had left him, and Cas had fallen. His name returned to its full length, and fury drugged him into violent lust.

 

Nothing compared with the pleasure Dean had given him, but he searched everywhere for it. Empty fumbles with others, narcotics, a new start— none of it had returned anything to Castiel.

 

Only fighting, drawing out a pain so different to his own, provided an alternate pastime to picking at the scar tissue of a life lost.

 

Dimly, Castiel noted that his opponent had been left on the sidelines, where a woman clutched his unmoving body. They normally called the loser’s medical team over after a fight.

 

His reward was passed to him and he exited the arena.

 

* * *

 

Once the savage gluttony had deserted him, Castiel sat down on the bed in his room. Alone.

 

He hung his head between his legs, pain replacing rage, a far more destructive fire.

 

The image of the still body on the side of the arena came back to him. They usually called the loser’s medical team. They always called the medical team, unless the fight had been fatal. 

They hadn’t called the medical team.

 

Bile leapt rabidly into his throat. Castiel found that he was braced on the floor, retching onto the carpet as he realised what he had done.

 

The desire to dull those green eyes had been fulfilled— but they weren’t the right green eyes.

 

Castiel had killed a man. No wonder he had been pulled away. 

He had murdered, and he hadn’t even noticed.

 

His tears cradled him into sleep as he mourned the death of a stranger, and of the Castiel he had once been.

 

* * *

 

 

He woke up in his own vomit, and the stench and the memory provoked a replay.

 

Eyes and nose streaming, he stumbled into the shower. His skin reddened at the heat, but he felt nothing.

He dressed, and left his apartment. He razed through the crowds to that place he knew.

 

He sat down in the dust of the parking space— the last place he had seen Dean.

 

As he traced the scabs on his hands, he attributed each a memory.

 

The swelling of his left ring finger could be the time they had first met, the day events had catapulted him from who he had been. He relished the irony, a band of red rather than the promised gold. The missing nail of the index finger of that same hand, their third kiss, the one which had stolen his soul. The purpling bruise from edge to centre, their first fight; the blood blister from his own nails clinging into a fist, crescent-mooned confessions of love; the broken skin running across his right knuckles, each time they had made love, the purelit wonder of skin on skin and complete submission to the knowledge that Dean was the one.

 

_We could have had it all._

_But we didn’t._

Castiel raised his hand to the exploited skin of his cheek, stretched to extremis across the definitely broken bone there. He pressed onto it, dragging sparks from his eyes that burnt down his face.

 

He tasted the salt in his mouth and knew it was over. He had rolled in the deep for too long.

 

They had never had it all, and he had just been too blind to realise.

 

Dean had left him, but had not taken him— Castiel had done that. Yes, Dean had played him, but Castiel had given himself over to the beat of the broken.

 

He spat onto the floor, and watched his saliva darken the tarmac and then evaporate as if it had never been there.

 


End file.
